The Green Light
by Losselen
Summary: Zack. Cloud. Generic. Unreal. Yaoi.


"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us." -_The Great Gatsby_, F. Scott Fitzgerald 

~ 

Zack can't stand the Midgar sky. You start to notice that when you see him long enough.

Cloud sees it through. He'd seen the pictures, Zack's sun-brown and lucent skin, something wholesome showing through it like wildness. (It's very hard to think of the word "wholesome" in Midgar, because it would be pure irony if they are even used in the same sentence.) But look at Zack now, pale with the city and tamed by mako, incandescent with the green and ungodly glow like some sort of monstrous halo. There is no wildness in his eyes, but a quieter languor that slid beneath Zack's personality.

He has the feeling that Zack wasn't fully happy, even though he pretends.

The thing about ShinRa is that it is about pretense, sometimes nothing else, actually, except for gils and mako. So it doesn't really matter, does it, if the air is so thick with disgust that it's sagging, or if the eye and nose can't get past the burning of mako and blood, eternally stained onto memory.

(And what does place does happiness hold in military anyway? Any idiot can figure out that being happy has nothing to do with Yes sir! No sir! and certainly not sword-blades and guns and killing. But perhaps people are as bloodlusty as Cloud thinks—perhaps there is glee and beauty in the destruction of a soul, because the only power in this world is the power to make someone else suffer and die.)

Hollow, Cloud sees right through the people. They're hollow.

He used to think that the mountains were hollow. He used to think that there were souls inside them, thousands of souls trapped here and there and the mako reactor was their only way out. But he is tired of the mountains, the white-spikes unfolded towards the sky, the wind callous, cold, philosophical. He is tired of the sun that shone only grimly above the streets—dim and somehow melancholic. And yet he can't bring himself to think of the mountains, the leaves wavering into brittle substances, the air, cool, fresh air and the way resonance sounds on its way back, fading away.

Midgar is a different affair. A city of lights, rain-glazed asphalt echoing the florescence and smoke, blinking dots and patches and shapeless green glows. Neon-rain, they call it. There is a grimy quality about Midgar that Cloud can never get use to, the same thing, he supposes, that's incinerating the life and wildness from Zack's skin.

It is something in the air, it must be.

(So thick, so thick, thick like the mutant trees that lace their roots onto the Nibel Mountains. Thick like the human antipathy, lonely, lonely thoughts.)

He'd always thought that Midgar would be charming. Because he'd seen the lights, the panoramic, sweeping photograph of the city, green and red in all its glory, golden with swoon and promise, dark against a sky's blue—which, Cloud dubiously noted when he first arrived, was actually a color of rust and iron-smoke—extravagance shinning through the fiberglass windows, ribbons of light and hauteur. But when he came, the splendor faded away to an unreality of vainness. He finally sighed and let go of dreams.

And still to this day, he can't adapt.

Some things you just can't ever get used to, for example, the strangeness of the ocean. He'd been to Junon once on a mission and he'd caught a glimpse of the ocean, a white path of shimmer paved into the void, riddled and quiet and mysterious. There is something underneath it that he doesn't understand, something that causes the waves to roll into tubes and foam-braids, for some years he thought it was the wind blowing across the surface, but it is something beneath the ocean after all.

He tries not to think about it.

It's unsettling.

But the more he tries not to, the more it comes back. This way, you get to find out about fragility, lovely thing that it is, and how it feels when it chokes your chest and tells you that you're immaterial after all.

~

Hands are unbuckling his belt and with a series of clatters it falls free. Cloud absently wonders why loneliness can make a man insane like this, sort of like desperation, angry, howling desperation, separating the lust from the love, the solid from the shadow. Fingers are stroking through his hair in a gentle rhythm and breathy kisses come to him in pairs, warm and lax and bitter. Zack is hovering above his head, Cloud's body pinned between the sheets, and he keeps thinking about how unreal this situation is. Zack's clothes smell like cigarettes, so does his mouth and hair and flesh.

Hands. Eager hands. All Cloud can feel are Zack's hands, swiftly undressing his own mask, peeling away the fanciful ponders and replacing them with want. Zack hasn't said a word. There is something unreal about this, Cloud says, not aloud of course, but silently to himself. This is a fervent July-day, one of those that burnt into people's patience, and made them dream things they shouldn't dream of.

But suddenly, Zack smiles and his mouth then opens in a warming laugh, his eyes full of longing and safety.

Then it strikes Cloud that he is scenting Zack's hair. Zack's hair is dark and soft and touchable. Intensity and closeness is woven into his hair, along with a smell of cigarettes and blood, a wound-up smell of Zack's personality. It puts significance outforth into the air around them, suddenly reminding Cloud of sun-brown skin reflecting the yellow-green of Gongaga's forests, like love's dreaming.

Yes, that's what it is, _love's dreaming_. A phrase whose meaning, if Cloud repeats the words, would be lost forever. (Because his illusion will be shattered if he realizes what the word _love_ really means.)

Zack seems happy now, Cloud notes, his skin chafing against the sheets. He turns his head, Zack's mouth on his neck, Zack's hands on his hip. Funny how years of deceit can be done away in just one touch, one warm touch to that place, stumbled across the flesh, skin, _touch_. Yes, that's what it is, _touch_. It is a touch on the cheek that wake Cloud every morning from slumber, a touch that he suspects of being a gesture of protection. It is the first thing that Cloud knows each day, the cold, cold hand of Zack on his face, a comforting gesture to a still-timid boy. (That's what Cloud is, underneath, a boy not-quite-grown with the guise of a cynical observer.)

Now Cloud is hot now for an entirely different reason, hot all over, breaths guiding down his hips, Zack in between his thighs, all over him, inside him. Zack's movements are instinctual and in tune to the sharp pain Cloud feels. Pain is the reality, Cloud closes his eyes. Pain is the reality, he whimpers. When he comes, the pain isn't there anymore.

_Where had it gone?_

~

Cloud gets the impression that Zack doesn't care about the future.

~ 

It is a September night, sheer as autumn nights all are, when leaves are falling in Nibelheim and are knitting themselves into red-orange-yellow scarves. Cloud stands on his guarding location, rifle-in-hand, wishing for moon's ashen light instead of green glows. He likes to think about things on tedious jobs like this—a brooding soldier, what an oxymoron—and he stops now, mid-stride. It hits him that he doesn't care about the future either. He's stuck, he stands there musing, stuck in the hollow mountains, the glassy prisons of nostalgia.

Ironic now to think that he is already nostalgic at the full age of sixteen. Sixteen, he says in his mind. It sounds terribly young and wild and frightening. Sixteen. It eludes him then, the enchantment of the past.

Yes. The past. By the insensate nature of the minds, the uncaring of time, he is brought back to the past. To the mountains.

~

_All he remembered were the mountains  
stretching into oblivion,  
nothing came after that_

Nothing now,  
A patch of hair reminds him of humanity  
with its scent,  
like soft spots on the neck  
coaxing tears from him,  
And he hated how he broke down into poetry,  
looking back from the train-window

the day after  
He tell himself that he's never going away  
because he can't take the nostalgia,  
sort of like leaving autumn behind  
an ache in the heart  
insatiable, wild heart  
And the blue eyes far, far away from home. 

he hates goodbye:  
it bears a vulnerability he can never understand,  
not only the melancholy  
but the void afterwards,  
right down in the middle cut with a dagger,  
(Even if it is parting to strangeness that he doesn't grasp anyway  
Because once they're there,  
They are in his breath,  
temporarily familiar)

Then sometimes he bears with it  
A void in the center  
So it, too, becomes  
familiar in a vague way  
(Maybe he's even immune, he doesn't know…)

And then, he goes back to the mountains. 


End file.
